Inbetween Lines:
It had come without warning on a beautiful day, the air crisp even as a gentle breeze whirled about, that foul, sickly bittersweet taste pervading his every sense after the gentlest whiff of a Lucky Strike caught him off guard. Worse yet, Dave had been alone out on a walk by himself when this had occurred, his skin surging in crawling waves of discomfort as the very air he breathed seemed to constrict him within...and without. Even as the light burned with the intensity of his every sin, Dave barely managed to stumble his way back to his car in time to let loose a growling scream as the pain became too much. In what felt like hours and could only have been minutes, and taking a tremendous amount of effort, Dave managed to crack open an eye and discovered the car already in motion, speeding through familiar neighborhoods in search of the one place he knew he could get a
fix...
Revulsion rocked his form, and with an effort that pushed him once more into the dark, he pulled off to the side of the road and desperately tried to make a call from the payphone, praying that-
Pain.
In three dimensional space, the addition of motion creates the necessity of the fourth, time. Because time cannot exist without motion, and motion cannot exist without energy, stillness welcomes the dispersal of energy, of heat, and becomes a kind of an...apathetic tranquility, as entropy is welcomed in the return to form, back to a world where there are only three dimensions. He was unsure of how long he'd lain there, as the pain ebbed and flowed through his form leaving him in a baseless state unfit to call Dave, let alone sentient, and had so welcomed the cold. Voices had called to him in the everdistance, muted as if spoken through a thick fog, and though at times he could
almost make out words and persons...there was only
Pain.
In the end, he awoke on Bruce's couch, much to the relief of his friend, who'd tried letting Dave know something important but the words only blurred together in both their earnestness and his failing ability to understand.
Bruce stood alone in the kitchen, a cold cup of coffee clutched forcefully in his palms, Carrie having gone to bed long ago even as he stood watch over his friend well into the witching hour.
That phone call...it still made him shudder to hear the savage and broken plea, that primal call for aid, its sound continuing to reverberate into the late hour; if he hadn't been by the phone for that call...
He'd long known about his friend's former habits, and while it had mostly had fallen to the wayside in the time he had known him, rarely having seen one of the bad days where his friend tended to hole up in the office and refused to see the light of day for its entirety, he'd remembered. But in comparison to Carrie's far less frequent flares, having managed to tend to the worst of it back when it had been developing, this was a man fully grown, who'd looked into the abyss and it had found him...wanting, and still struggling with those demons to this day, and so...there was no comparison.
That jolted him a tad, forcibly recalling (for the nth time that night) that he needed to check in with her in the morning, to ensure that bringing Dave here wouldn't cause a relapse for her as well; it was unlikely, but with his broiling emotion, he was feeling far more protective than usual.
He glanced down again at his friend's journals, each a different make, with the one with cherry leather binding open before him. While most pages held nothing but doodles and brief outlines for various projects, it was the notes for Star Wars he was currently invested in.
He'd briefly glimpsed George's side of things a year or so back, rough outlines for a sextet of films and plenty of material beyond, Dave here seemed to have a rough sketch for the background essences and lore of the franchise, such as Vader being in charge of an
Imperial Inquisition with
a favored apprentice, a dark reflection of one
he'd held before...well, what came before he couldn't
quite make out, much of it coached in terms of both cinematic, thematic and religious imagery, but it was beautiful in its stark outlines. It was the final passages that gave him pause however, in that they seemed to be less cinematic and more...prose?
He glanced idly over at Dave, finally still after hours of intense sweating and thrashing, and, while he didn't want to read more into his friend's behaviors, they seemed to echo his current state.
'
Only love myself, no more, Take you to the grave, I'll ghost
I know I can be so cold, In the dark
Where I like to keep my heart, Know I'm all bite, no bark
Like to catch you way off guard, I'll stay so deep inside your brain
And take you somewhere far away.'
Bruce then closed the journal, placing it atop the others he had found on Dave's person, and prayed the Sorrowful Mysteries upon his old alderwood rosary, given to him long ago in Ireland, before they had left the Emerald Isle for the New World. In this way, he held watch until the morn, when Feet came by and relieved him of the vigil so as to rest.
A/N: To clarify, Bruce still has no idea about Vader and Anakin, the note just says "In halcyon days, before he'd lost his beloved apprentice".
